Hands On: Chrome Beta for Android — the Platform’s Best New Browser

To say I’ve been waiting for Chrome to come to Android for some time is an understatement. I’ve wanted a proper Google browser on my phone ever since I chose Android for my mobile platform. Finally, after years of saddling Android users with a generic browser short on performance and features, Google deployed a beta version of Chrome for Android 4.0 devices on Tuesday.

The Gadget Lab editors and I have been playing with Chrome on a Galaxy Nexus smartphone and Asus Transformer Prime for the last two days, and can report it’s far better than any Android browser we’ve used thus far. From tabbed browsing to multi-device syncing, it’s a must-download for anyone running the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Google’s mobile OS.

Like any modern browser, Chrome for Android boasts tabbed browsing, so you’re not forced to leave pages every time you want to get to another site. This isn’t unique to Chrome’s new app. All of the majors — Firefox, Dolphin, Opera, and even the stock Android browser — include tabbed browsing in some form or another.

But Chrome’s tabbed browsing veneer comes with a little extra polish relative to its competitors. In the phone version of Chrome, tapping the tab selection button in the upper right-hand corner spawns a drop-down screen of your open pages, with each site thumbnail appearing like a playing card resting atop a deck. Swipe your finger up and down to skim through the thumbnails, or flick horizontally to get rid of any open pages. Think of it as less Mozilla and more WebOS.

This “deck of cards” metaphor isn’t enabled in the tablet version of Chrome, because it’s not necessary; tabs are spread out and easy to manipulate on the tablet version, just as they would be on a desktop. But the feature is essential on the smaller screen real estate of a smartphone.

As is the case in Chrome for desktops, you can browse incognito on Chrome for Android. This means your web surfing won’t appear in the browser’s history, and any new cookies you create will be deleted as soon as you close the incognito tab. In the Android app, incognito tabs are separated from non-incognito tabs, so you’re able to keep better track of all the content you’re viewing on the down low (in Android’s generic Browser app, private and public tabs intermingle). And if you somehow forget which “state” you’re in — public or private — the bar at the top of the incognito screen is darkened for differentiation.

It’s important to note a significant absence amid all of these features: Adobe Flash support is nowhere to be found. On the one hand, the omission is strange, given Flash support has been one of the trumpeted upsides to using Android devices instead of iPhones. And yet the absence of Flash isn’t wholly unexpected — Adobe killed Flash development for mobile devices last year, after all. Given Google’s resolute backing of HTML5, it’s a bold signal, a shift from one era to the next. The web is far from dead, as Google SVP of Chrome Sundar Pichai would say.

Hands down, the star of the Chrome show is the browser’s syncing capability. Pichai’s goal was to take Chrome — the full version of Chrome — and spread it evenly across all devices: desktops, tablets, smartphones, and in the case of Chrome OS, netbooks as well. Pichai and company aimed for a seamless browsing experience when moving from device to device to device.

Does it work? Yes. All it takes is signing into your Google account on every device, and you’re able to pick up browsing where you left off on all your sundry hardware. Bookmarks, passwords and browsing history are all synced across devices. It may not sound like much, but it’s a huge time saver when trying to type in the same old URLs and search terms across multiple devices — especially when entering data on tiny, touchscreen keyboards. Damn you, autocorrect!

But sync is much more than just bookmark memory. Let’s say you’re looking up a restaurant on your laptop at home. You head out the door, only to forget the exact cross streets of the joint’s location halfway through your drive. With Chrome for Android, you’re able to recall those open tabs from your laptop browser, instantly finding the restaurant’s address on your Galaxy Nexus. The “other devices” menu located within the option bar shows you each separate device you have currently running Chrome, and which tabs you have open in each.

Granted, it’s a subtle flourish that could be overlooked by people who only peel through one-off pages at random when browsing on their smartphones. But it’s really so much more than this. As Pichai envisions, synced browsing is a peek into our future as multi-device-carrying, always-connected humans who use different tools for different situations.

Indeed, it makes no sense to drag your laptop to the couch — that’s why we have tablets. So instead of revisiting all of your pages through manual searches again and again, synchronicity across devices keeps browsing simple, seamless and interconnected. We want access to everything, everywhere and we want it as fast as possible. Chrome for Android is a major step in that direction.

Jon Phillips contributed reportingTabbed browsing, one of a number of fancy add-ons that come with the new Chrome app. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com